Assassin's Blood (The Alan Graham Mysteries) Read online

  She stared at me for a long time.

  “You’ve heard what I think of this project,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You’ve got a lot of nerve.” She jerked her head at the empty seat beside her. “Get in.”

  I climbed in, and she moved the gun so that it separated us like a bar.

  “If they build this dam, won’t they expropriate your land?” I asked.

  “They’ll try,” she said. “But I’ll slow ’em down, and maybe by then there’ll be another governor and the dam won’t seem like such a good idea.”

  “Did you grow up here?” I asked, trying to find common ground.

  But she wasn’t interested in talking. She just shook her head.

  “No.”

  We came to the other side of the field, and I saw the house now through the trees. A red pickup with a camper sat in the yard behind it.

  “By the way, I saw a man back there,” I said. “He ran across the creek, headed in this direction. Did you see anybody else come through here?”

  “Nobody came through here,” she said and jerked the emergency brake. “Wait here. I have to go inside. Then I’ll take you to town, and you can call a garage or whatever.”

  I watched her hop down, taking the rifle with her as if I might steal it. She headed for the back door, and as she opened it, a curtain moved in one of the back windows, and I realized someone was watching. I looked around the yard, tried to imagine soirees and lazy summer afternoons, but there was a tension that hung over the place. Partly it was the rigidity I sensed in the woman, but it also derived from what I’d heard about the deaths of her son and husband. This was an unhappy house, and Cynthia Devlin was, as I had been told, an angry woman.

  She came back out a few minutes later and got back in without a word.

  Ten minutes later we were in Jackson, and she turned off Highway 10, then slowed in front of the new red-brick post office.

  “There’s a phone in here,” she said. “Next time, I’d appreciate it if you’d stay off my property.”

  I nodded. “I’ll try to remember. And thank you.”

  I watched her make a U-turn and then disappear back the way we had come. I went into the post office, started to ask the woman at the counter where the police station was, and changed my mind. This had been outside the city, which made it sheriff’s business. Instead, I found the pay phone and called the office to tell David I’d be late.

  “Bombast called for you,” he said. “She acted upset because you weren’t here.”

  “Did she say what she wanted?” Maybe they were going to cancel the project. Good news for Cyn Devlin, but not very good news for our firm.

  “She just wanted to tell you the delivery order is on its way.”

  “Thoughtful,” I said.

  I walked down to the Exxon station and asked if there was somebody who could drive me out to the McNair tract and bring a couple of tires in for repair. The owner gave me a funny look but called his mechanic. Half an hour later we’d replaced one tire with the spare, pulled off the other front tire, and thrown both the ruined tires into the back of the pickup, leaving the Blazer’s right front jacked up as we drove back to the gas station.

  “I guess you figured there’s people don’t want this thing,” the mechanic said. “But they don’t got to cut people’s tires.”

  “It could be worse,” I said. “Didn’t I hear about a man getting shot on that parcel last year?”

  “Doug Devlin? Yeah. But that didn’t have nothing to do with the dam. That was probably just a hunter shouldn’t’ve been there.”

  We slowed as we came to Highway 10, and the driver jammed on the brakes. A red pickup with a camper flew past us, headed east, out of town, and I caught a glimpse of a man in a checked shirt behind the wheel.

  It was the same truck I’d seen parked behind the Devlin house, and I was sure the driver was the mysterious man I’d followed up to the cabin. And yet she claimed she hadn’t seen anyone …

  “Have any idea who that was in the truck?” I asked.

  The mechanic spit a stream of brown juice out his window.

  “Looked like Blake Curtin. Probably been down there at Cyn’s. Good pair,” he grunted. “She’s crazy and he don’t talk.”

  “He’s mute?”

  “Like a possum, though they say he used to talk once.”

  “He’s a friend of the family?” I asked.

  “Friend of Doug’s. Now he’s friends with Cyn since Doug got killed.” He spat again. “Does odd jobs, helps her keep the place up. Anyhow, that’s what they say.” He leered. “Well, it ain’t none of my business.”

  We reached the filling station, and I waited while he pulled the old tires off the rims and replaced them with new ones. Then we drove back to the Blazer, and he put on one new tire and threw the other into the back. I followed him back to town and paid with my credit card, a hundred and ninety dollars when it was all done. Then I drove east through seven miles of rolling pasture lands to Clinton and parked on the square in front of the stately old white courthouse with columns and cupola. I went into the little steep-roofed brick building on the west side of the courthouse proper and presented myself to the bored deputy at the desk.

  “I’d like to file a report,” I said.

  He listened to my complaint, told me I could have accomplished the same at the substation in Jackson, and then helped me fill out some papers.

  “Don’t expect much,” he said. “Some folks just don’t want that dam.”

  “They need to see their congressman, not me.”

  “Right.”

  “By the way, you know a man named Curtin?”

  The deputy folded his arms.

  “Blake Curtin?”

  “That’s right.

  “You think he did this?”

  “I don’t know. I just saw him leaving the area in a hurry.

  He was headed for the Devlin place.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “He live around here?”

  “On Highway 68, on the south side of Jackson. Has a trailer. But I wouldn’t go trying to track down Blake. He ain’t all there. I’d leave him to us.”

  “Whatever.”

  I drove back to Baton Rouge, gave my receipt to Marilyn, and gritted my teeth while she told me what that did to our cash flow.

  “We’ll find some way to charge it off to the project,” I said lamely.

  That night I fed Digger, my mixed shepherd, and took him for a walk. He seemed to know my mood, and his ears drooped slightly, as if in sympathy. Afterward I sat alone in the old house on Park Boulevard and listened to the ghosts come and go. The ghosts spoke as creaks and groans and the scraping of branches against the eaves. Sometimes I imagined that I heard the voices of my parents. And other times I thought I heard Pepper’s voice calling to me from upstairs, where I slept.

  Sometimes I was angry with her for leaving, but then I told myself that I was reading too much into it, that she’d be back.

  But why leave in the first place? I’d offered her a place in the firm.

  And maybe that was the problem: She didn’t want to accept anything she didn’t feel she’d earned. So she’d taken time off to think it over.

  Ghosts.

  I found myself wondering if Cyn Devlin had ghosts in her husband’s house, too.

  Then I thought about the lonely little cabin. Why was it linked to Oswald? Had someone actually seen him there in 1963, during his brief trip to the Felicianas? Or were there things about his trip that no one had ever found out?

  Ghosts … maybe that was what it was all about, anyway, because this whole part of the world was filled with them. The ghosts of the early settlers, like Bernardo de Galvez, the Spanish governor who had named the Felicianas after his wife; the ghost of Huey Long, who had been shot by a mild-mannered doctor and now stood in the capitol gardens encased in bronze; the ghosts of my parents, who still haunted the old family home on Park Boulevard …r />
  That night I dreamed I was standing by the creek with the land reaching up on either side of me. As I started across the sandbar, I heard a roaring, and when I looked up, I saw a wall of water rushing toward me. I turned to run, but it caught me in midstride and sucked me into its depths. Around me I saw bits of trees and stones, and I knew that I was dying.

  It was just before darkness closed over me that I saw him, a slightly built young man with a sneer, rifle clutched in his right hand, a holster around his waist. He was turning over and over, and I wondered how he managed to keep from thrashing.

  Then I realized where I had seen him before. It was in a photograph we’d all seen: Lee Harvey Oswald, standing in his backyard, with his rifle. Lee, the assassin …

  FOUR

  The next morning we interviewed potential crew for the dam project. There were four applicants, two men and two women. One of the men was a business major and his skin was the color of dead fish. He’d be a candidate for heat stroke, and I told David to hire the other three.

  “What about the Lawrence girl,” he asked. “You think she can cut it?”

  One of the female applicants was a thick-bodied Cajun who looked like she could wrestle a bear. The Lawrence girl, however, was petite, with black hair in a page-boy cut and a vivacious smile.

  I reread her application.

  Meg Lawrence. Third year anthropology student. Summer field school last year. Two courses in geology.

  “I don’t see anything wrong,” I said.

  He shrugged. “I know this sounds funny, but there was something about her smile.”

  “Her smile?”

  “I have a gut feeling she may be trouble.”

  I scanned the references on her vitae. One of them was from Stuart Laskar, an archaeologist at the University.

  “I’ll check her out,” I said. “But unless there’s some horror story …”

  David nodded, and I put the applications aside.

  I suddenly realized I hadn’t eaten and walked over to Louie’s for huevos rancheros and a cup of iced coffee.

  When I got back, I was still fidgety. I didn’t think Blake Curtin had cut my tires yesterday and jumped me, but why had he acted so suspiciously, and why had the Devlin woman lied about seeing him? I was a stranger, so why did it matter what I thought? I had the sense of plunging into something more than a mere archaeological survey, and I didn’t like the feeling. Then I remembered what Clyde Fontenot had told me: Cyn’s brother-in-law, Buck, lived in Baton Rouge. All at once I wanted to know what he could tell me about the land and about his sister-in-law, her strange friend, and the way her husband had died.

  There were only two Devlins in the phone book, one a married couple and the other a Francis. I tried the second and waited while the phone rang. On the fifth buzz, as I was about to hang up, a man’s voice answered.

  “Is this Buck Devlin?” I asked.

  “That’s right. Who is this?”

  I told him my name. “I’m under contract to the Corps of Engineers to do part of the environmental impact statement for the property you own near Jackson. I wonder if I could come talk to you about it?”

  “Now?”

  “Is that possible?”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “I’ll be over in ten minutes,” I said.

  His house was a white frame structure on Arrowhead, just off Lee. The lawn was neatly trimmed, and there was a rock-bordered garden with jonquils and dahlias. A Bronco sat in the driveway, its front facing the street as if liable to be called upon for a getaway.

  I rang the bell and waited, but after a minute there was no response, so I walked around to the driveway and made my way to the backyard.

  What caught my eye first was the deck with what appeared to be a hot tub. Then I saw the man.

  Buck Devlin was stripped to the waist, crouching over a set of barbells. Though he was ten years my senior, his muscles rippled as he lifted the bar to his chest and began a series of presses. Sweat rolled down his torso, and his neck muscles bulged. The bandanna that held his hair out of his face was soaked through. As he lifted, he counted silently, and I sensed he still didn’t know I was there. When he was finished, he eased the barbell to the ground, threw back his head, and gulped in the air.

  “Mr. Devlin,” I said.

  His head came around slowly to fix on me.

  “That’s me,” he said, reaching for a towel.

  “I’m sorry to break in,” I said. “I’ll try not to take too much of your time.”

  “Too much of my time.” Devlin smiled and nodded and finished drying himself with his towel. The back door of the house opened, and an oriental woman looked out and asked a question in a language I couldn’t understand. Devlin answered back and then came over with his hand outstretched.

  “She asked if you wanted any iced tea. I told her I didn’t know but bring an extra glass. She’s a good woman. Her father did the garden. You like it?”

  “Very beautiful,” I said.

  The woman appeared with a tray holding a pitcher and two glasses. She set it on the deck and disappeared back into the house. She was not much more than twenty, with a tiny waist and a round face.

  “I managed to get her and her parents over here,” Devlin said, pouring tea into a glass and handing it to me. “A connection in State.”

  “You were in the Army,” I said.

  He nodded. “But not much of what I did in the last ten years was what people think of as military.”

  For the first time I noticed the eagle tattoo on his right shoulder.

  “I hear you’re in favor of expropriating your sister-in-law’s property near Jackson.”

  “That’s right. It isn’t really her property. Not in the moral sense. She never did a damned thing to earn it. It was in our family long before she ever met Doug.”

  “You don’t like her,” I said.

  “No. I told him she was a gold digger when he met her, and I haven’t changed my mind. She came from north Louisiana trailer trash. When she found Doug, she dug in her hooks like an assassin bug, and she hasn’t let go yet.”

  “Why do you think she’s against this dam?”

  “Because if they build it, she’ll have a recreational lake in her backyard with people fishing and waterskiing. Maybe there’re things she doesn’t want ’em to see.”

  “But you think the dam is a good idea.”

  “It’ll make money for me. That’s all I care about.” He sipped his tea and then put the glass down on the tray.

  “Look, Graham, I was in the Army for thirty-six years. I went places nobody in their right mind would go.” He pointed to a scarred area on his stomach. “You see that? I got ripped open by a sharp piece of bamboo held by somebody who thought I knew something. I retired as a lieutenant colonel, and they gave me the National Security Medal. You know what kind of pension that is? I never lived on that damn land. If somebody wants to buy it, that’s fine with me. If Doug was living, I might hold off if he had strong feelings. But not for Cyn. She doesn’t have any claim.”

  “What about a man named Blake Curtin?” I asked. “You ever heard of him?”

  The colonel’s gray eyes narrowed. “What did you hear about Curtin?”

  I shrugged. “I was there yesterday and saw him at the place. He seems to hang around, and I was wondering if he’ll be a problem.”

  “Screw him. If he gives you any trouble, call the sheriff and have his butt thrown in jail. He’s just like Cyn—they’re two of a kind. He was Doug’s friend, you know.”

  I finished my tea.

  “You ever been to that cabin on your land?” I asked.

  “Sure. I expect they’ll tear it down. Nobody’s used it for twenty years.”

  “Not Lee Oswald’s ghost?” I said.

  Devlin frowned slightly, then threw back his head and laughed, but I thought the laugh was forced.

  “You’ve heard the stories, eh?”

  “Just thought I’d ask.”

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sp; “You know, I was home from boot camp that summer before Kennedy was shot. I don’t remember anything about Oswald being there. I think it’s something they made up to put the place on the map. Every other town in Louisiana’s got Lafitte’s treasure. Jackson’s got Kennedy’s assassin.”

  “You’re probably right,” I allowed. “And I don’t guess there’s anything else on that land—like an Indian site?”

  “Not that I know of. But you’re free to look.” He got up and stuck out a hand. “Well, good luck, or, as we used to say, good hunting. And don’t let Cyn run you off.”

  “Thank you, Colonel.”

  That afternoon I called Stuart Laskar at the anthropology department and asked him about Meg Lawrence. When he chuckled, I got an uneasy feeling.

  “Does that mean she’s trouble?”

  “No. She did well at our field school last year. Carried her load and then some. Polite, bright, good personality.”

  “But?”

  “Nothing. I recommend her.”

  “Then why is David doubtful?”

  Stuart chuckled again. “Meg makes some people uneasy. She says what’s on her mind. Some people can’t deal with that.”

  I thought over what he had said, then called Meg Lawrence and told her to report in field gear the next morning.

  When I hung up, I told David I was going to the map library in the geography department to review some aerial photos. We had a little waste dump project of a hundred acres near Carencro, and I wanted to make sure there were no structures shown in the Soil Conservation Service photos taken in the early forties. But in reality I wanted to drop by the history department and talk to Byron Foster. Byron was a specialist in recent American history. He’d never risen above associate professor because he spent most of his time with his students instead of grinding out publications, and I found him in his office now with a student while another waited her turn in the hall. I went to the library, which is only a few steps away, located the volume I was looking for, and when I came back, Byron was free.